As I was wandering over Waterloo Bridge, I spotted a Blimp flying above London.
I find that Blimps have an otherworldly quality. Sleek, silent, and majestic.
I fired off a few photos as it flew overhead. It then turned and went to approach The Shard. Where, finally, it docked and her passengers alighted.
Here's the time lapse:
Of course, it was just a trick of perspective. But wouldn't it be wonderful to commute over London by airship?
A delightful evening in London spent watching a pair of helicopters fly through Tower Bridge.
It appears that it's part of the London™ 2012© Olympics® opening ceremony.
First, the practice run:
Then the three flights through the bridge
Thanks to IanVisits for alerting us to the event, and Tom Scott for organising the picnic.
At the start of 2012, I revealed how many scans TfL's QR campaign was getting.
A lot of comments on Twitter & Google+ dismissed these results as a success. A typical response was:
70 scans a day? In a city of millions? Rubbish!
This fails to address something that advertisers are conspicuously loathe to reveal - the true "response rate" of any advert is hard to calculate. How many phone calls, visits to a website, or SMS interactions are directly attributable to a regular poster? No one really knows - or, if they know, they're not telling.
For the first time, we're able to see how many people are reacting to an advert, scanning a code, and then visiting a site.
Currently, TfL's campaign is running at 5,000 scans per month - peaking at 259 scans on April 3rd.
Or, 16,000 in the last five months.
With a rather nice growth in usage in the last few months.
Here come the nay-sayers....
But... But.... How many sites is that across? Millions of people, thousands of sites, only a few scans? Rubbish!
So, I performed a Freedom of Information request to TfL.
There were around 400 sites showing these posters in November. That may have changed by now.
Ideally, I would have liked TfL to have created a unique QR code for each poster. That way we could see Putney gets more scans than Waterloo, for example. But I appreciate the logistical difficulties of that!
We also get some interesting statistics about the makes of phones that Londoners use:
| Platforms | Count | Percentage | Change from January |
|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone | 9001 | 56% | +12 |
| Android | 3651 | 23% | -4 |
| BlackBerry | 2869 | 18% | -4 |
| Windows | 179 | 1% | - |
iPhone has surged ahead - at the expense of Android and BlackBerry. Windows Phone 7 still remains a minority sport.
Frankly, I don't care too much what the doom-mongers say. Having over 16,000 responses to a poster campaign sounds like a success to me. And, best of all, the data is open for anyone to investigate.
If you disagree with me - I polietly ask you to show your workings :-)
Wandering through London today, I noticed that Southbank London has put QR codes on its posters. I've mentioned before the dangers of using Bit.ly as a QR code generator - as it allows us to peek at the codes' performance statistics.
Here are the codes on the posters - click for bigger.
As all the codes use Bit.ly so we can see how well they've performed - click on each one for the latest statistics.
Not the most impressive of campaigns.
Three strong points to note before pointing out how (in)effective QR marketing is:
Why would you point a QR code at a non-mobile site?
And, just as bad, why not point directly to an app-store when you want people to download an app?
Ah, it's because your advert's promise of an Android app is a lie.
Very disappointing.
Last year, I suggested that TfL should use QR codes to point to their excellent mobile countdown service.
Looks like someone was listening! I spotted this poster at a tube station.
Nestled in the corner is a QR code pointing at the mobile bus countdown service!
This is a close-to-perfect use of QR.
As I suggested in my original post, TfL could customise the code, or print a separate one for each bus stop. This is, however, an excellent start.
What's particularly useful is that TfL are using the goo.gl URL shortener - meaning we can see their statistics!
There's a dearth of good quality QR statistics which are publicly available. What is available is often put through the lens of a marketing team. So it's particularly refreshing to get the data straight from the source.
One simply needs to append any goo.gl URL with a "+" in order to see the statistics.
Since their launch in November, the QR codes have been scanned 4,500 times. I don't know how many of these posters are up, but that seems like a pretty impressive number.
The graph from the last month shows the codes are being scanned around 70 times per day.
We can get a rough idea of what sort of phones Londoners use - or, at least, what those who use the buses use.
| Platforms | Count |
|---|---|
| iPhone | 2014 |
| Android | 1247 |
| BlackBerry | 987 |
| Windows | 73 |
| Nokia | 58 |
| Symbian/3 | 34 |
| iPod | 15 |
iPhone takes a significant chunk - although not the majority - with 45%. Android coming next at 28%. BlackBerry still has a strong showing among Londoners with 22%.
I'm unsure whether "Windows" is WP7 or the older "Windows Mobile". Either way, Nokia's market share has collapsed.
The next interesting thing to look at is which countries the users are from.
| Countries | Count |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 4453 |
| Lithuania | 15 |
| United States | 10 |
| Germany | 2 |
| France | 2 |
| Italy | 2 |
| Jordan | 2 |
| Netherlands | 2 |
| Spain | 1 |
| Ireland | 1 |
As expected, the majority are using UK SIMS.
This doesn't count visitors who are using a local SIM on their stay - but it's still interesting to see where tose whoa re prepared to pay roaming data charges are coming from. Who knew so many Lithuanians loved our bus system...?
As far as I can tell, the Google statistics don't actively prevent duplications - so one enthusiastic Lithuanian could have scanned the code 15 times.
The data aren't entirely rigorous - but do show some interesting trends for QR use in London.
